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Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Roll 2d6

There's a lot more to tabletop role-playing games than dice-rolling. A lot more. Role-playing is about inhabiting a character, thinking the way they might do, telling a story with others, playing a game.
Oh yeah, and hopefully having a good time while doing it.

I started playing tabletop role-playing games in autumn 2011. In the last six months or so I've played Apocalypse World, Cyberpunk, D&D, Microscope and In A Wicked Age. It was while playing AW that I started thinking about the maths associated with some of the mechanics in games.

AW has you roll 2d6 for actions. Depending on what stat you are rolling with you have a modifier (generally) from -2 to +3. It dawned on me at one point that my character - a Gunlugger - would have to roll a 2 or a 3 in order to outright fail at an aggressive action.

With that being the case, questions come my way: should I steer my Gunlugger towards violence, as he'll succeed? Should I steer him away from violence to make things more interesting? What do other people think?

As a mathematician I know that maths is everywhere. Including tabletop role-playing games. And not just in terms of the statistics of dice rolling. And so the idea for this blog came about. I don't know exactly what I'll write about, although I have some ideas. I'll talk about some maths, some actual play, some setting ideas and some game mechanic/rule ideas.